cadet blogs

While I am certainly no Southerner-at-heart, there are some things that have become ingrained in my head from living in Georgia my entire life. One of those things: utter fascination with snow. It’s not that we never get a good dusting of white back home, but that’s all it is – a dusting, and only, if ever, in late January or maybe February. And the minute a few flakes start floating down, the whole state freaks out. Schools shut down; all the grocery stores within a ten mile radius of the “bad weather” are depleted of their stocks of bread and milk; the phone lines get tied up with family members all abuzz about “the storm.”

Imagine my astonishment when I woke up this morning to find white on the ground…in November.

Everyone in the corps seemed to have their own take on the wintery weather. My roommate – a Houston, TX native – was almost beside herself with excitement. At the same time, another 4/c in my company spent the morning lamenting how this “isn’t even real snow.” Others just seem to hate snow in the first place, “real” or not. As for me, I am delighted. This simple little turn of events made my Monday.

We don’t get seasons like this in Georgia. Summer consists of blazing hot, soup-like mugginess; spring and autumn are temperate, generally crisp, but warm, and quite comfortable; and winter is a slog through numbing, drippy, gray slush. Our state isn’t like Florida, mind you – we can, in fact, identify four distinct seasons, but they’re all moderate. They lack the intensity and distinctive quality of northern seasons. Everything blends together…you miss out on the extremes of hot and cold, light and dark hours, sights and scents of the outdoors as the climate shifts.

I get a marvelous jolt of energy out of seemingly the most insignificant impressions, experiences, and sensations. Here in Connecticut, when I can walk outside and look around and see everything all powdered in white, feel the sharp breeze stinging my cheeks, feel how warm and protected I am under my jacket, and smell late fall in the air, that’s all it takes to put me in a blissful mood for the rest of the day.

Simply put, I think that here at the Academy, the world is just gorgeous. It’s a beautiful thing to be able to wake up in the morning, take one quick look around and honestly say, “Wow, I love my life.”